Category Archives: Economics

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No one is above the law, and that includes our immigration laws We need to go after the people who knowingly employ illegal immigrants.

Thanks to my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach, I found this wonderful story:

Immigration arrests left NC restaurants short-staffed and job sites idle, owners say

By: Ahmed Jallow | Friday, February 20, 2026 | 5:30 PM EST

For two weeks last November, kitchens at David “Woody” Lockwood’s restaurants ran short of dishwashers, prep cooks and servers as workers stayed home, afraid to leave their houses during a federal immigration crackdown that resulted in more than 400 arrests across North Carolina.

“We had a lot of people, mostly in the kitchen, that didn’t feel safe coming to work,” said Lockwood, a co-owner of Trophy Brewing and The Bend. That meant managers working extra shifts, longer waits for customers and paying employees who were not on the job to help them get by.

“We decided, at least for those two weeks, to pay those people for the hours they missed, which is not a sustainable thing,” Lockwood said.

So, Mr Lockwood now knows exactly who among his employees is here and was working illegally. Perhaps he didn’t look at their I-9 documents closely, or perhaps he ignored legal requirements on hiring illegals, but now he knows who was working there illegally, and has absolutely no f(ornicating) excuses: he needs to discharge them all immediately, and inform Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, exactly who they were. If he does not disclose this information to ICE, he needs to be arrested for knowingly harboring illegals, along with the penalties for not insuring that those he hired were legally eligible to work in the United States.

It is possible that a few of his Hispanic-looking employees were in the country and working legally, and should now have their documents in hand to prove that if ICE comes calling, but the odds are that most were not legal.

It’s simple: if the illegals cannot find work in the United States, they’ll go home on their own.

Business owners and educators said the effects of the crackdown extended well beyond those taken into custody, disrupting construction and hospitality – two of the state’s largest industries – and keeping some students home from school.

Mikki Paradis, chief executive of PDI Drywall, said construction sites fell silent for more than a week during the November operations.

“There was not a single person working on those jobs,” said Paradis, who has relied on Hispanic workers throughout her 21-year career. She said these labor shortages would slow housing construction and drive up costs.

Translation: Miss Paradis has been knowingly hiring illegals, and ICE needs to visit her offices and start pulling the company’s I-9 files. If it can be proved that she knowingly hired illegals, she’s in a heap of trouble. Under the Handbook for Employers M-274, Section 11.8, it is specified that:

Unlawful Employment Criminal Penalties
Engaging in a Pattern or Practice of Knowingly Hiring or Continuing to Employ Unauthorized Aliens

If you or your business are convicted of having engaged in a pattern or practice of knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens (or continuing to employ aliens knowing they are or have become unauthorized to work in the United States) after Nov. 6, 1986, you may face fines and/or six months imprisonment.

Six months behind bars ought to teach Miss Paradis and Mr Lockwood the error of their ways, and scare the poop out of the other employers of illegals, scare them enough that they get rid of the illegals right away. If the illegals then self-deport, it just makes everything easier for ICE and law enforcement.

Will it cost Mr Lockwood and Miss Paradis their businesses? Perhaps it will, but if they were knowingly employing illegals, they deserve it. That, too, will get other employers to straighten up and fly right.

No one is above the law our Democratic friends told us when they were trying to get Donald Trump thrown in jail. Well, if no one is above the law, then no one is above our immigration laws as well.

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A half-hearted defense of Jeff Bezos

I have frequently said that I appreciated billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for buying The Washington Post from the Graham family in 2013. The family didn’t really want to sell the newspaper, but the Post was losing money every year, and they just couldn’t afford to keep it going. We don’t know when the Grahams would have had to declare bankruptcy, but it couldn’t have been much longer.

Mr Bezos, for his part, mostly kept his hands off the newspaper. But losses continued to mount, reportedly $100 million in 2023, $77 million in 2024, and $100 million again in 2025. The owner could afford to keep things going the way they were, but finally decided that enough is enough.

Naturally Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏 — was full of sob stories about the poor, poor laid off journalists, and I have sympathy for them as well: I hate to see anyone who hasn’t broken the law lose his job. But then I saw this from WUSA CBS Channel 9:

The situation we are in right now is entirely up to the abysmal mismanagement by The Washington Post leaders,” said Sarah Kaplan, a climate reporter with The Washington Post.

Kaplan says she takes issue with the positioning that the publication is losing subscribers because of the quality of work of her colleagues. She says the layoffs are going to have a profound impact on the already empty newsrooms. “I don’t know how I go back to work and do my job without all the people who were laid off yesterday,” she added.

To judge from the way she phrased it, Miss Kaplan is one of those who was not laid off. But this brought to mind another story, from my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach:

From that Climate Colored Goggles link in the first tweet

The Washington Post produced some of America’s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earth’s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I don’t think any U.S. news outlet published a greater volume of urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage.

Everything changed on Wednesday morning.

The Post sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told me, part of a massive round of cost-cutting that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs — about 30% of all employees at the Jeff Bezos-owned company.

The climate team layoffs include eight writer/reporters, an editor and several video, data and graphics journalists, I’m told. I’m not publishing their names, since many of them haven’t discussed their situations publicly. But to see the invaluable work they and their colleagues have been doing, check out the Post’s climate page here.

But, what are they really producing? How many articles? Anything of consequence? I rarely use the WP for my climate posts, and I rarely see any other Skeptics using their articles. Sounds like they are cutting a lot of bloat and dead weight. The WP is a business meant to make money, but are losing a ton because the product is bad.

If Phil Kerpen’s chart is correct, between 2020 and 2022, the Post’s global warming climate change reportorial staff increased six-fold in size. The department was cut back to 19 by 2025, so I suppose Miss Kaplan had plenty of friends, and is understandably distraught that 14 of them are now unemployed.

From Miss Kaplan’s biography:

Sarah Kaplan is a climate reporter covering humanity’s response to a warming world. Her job has taken her to a research camp atop the Greenland ice sheet, a shrinking glacier in the Peruvian Andes, Indian Ocean islands threatened by sea level rise and disaster-struck communities across the United States. She was part of the team of Post journalists recognized as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Helene’s human and environmental toll. She previously reported on Earth science and the universe at The Post.

Greenland, the Peruvian Andes, islands in the Indian Ocean? That sounds like a lot of money spent by a company which has lost $277 million over the last three years. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Bezos hasn’t really seen much of a return on the newspaper’s spending on this.

Then I saw this thanks to the tweet shown at the left by Streiff from RedState.

Just seventeen bylines — I assume that’s how Streiff researched it — in three months does not exactly seem like top productivity to me. If you were looking to cut costs, wouldn’t the least productive employees be the ones you’d lay off first?

There was my good friend Heather Long, who got out when the getting was good thanks to getting other job offers, who was sent several times to the cover the hoitiest and the toitiest at the World Economic Forum in the ski resort town of Davos in Switzerland. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect the newspaper to cover, but it was still an expensive trip to an expensive event. Perhaps the new Post will rely on Associated Press coverage?

But, as I said, this would be a half-hearted defense of Mr Bezos. Where, I have to ask, were the editors and managers who should have been seeing the less productive employees all along, the bosses who should have known, after the long series of business losses, that the fat needed to be trimmed, that economy and efficiency measures needed to be taken? That such wasn’t happening all along is directly on Mr Bezos, and the people he put in place to do that very thing.

Then there was the idiocy of canceling the endorsement of Kamala Harris Emhoff in 2024. Upon resuming editorial endorsements of Presidential candidates in 1976, the newspaper had always endorsed the Democratic candidate if they endorsed anyone at all, and the endorsement editorial was (supposedly) already written when Mr Bezos spiked it. Yes, Mrs Emhoff was as big a doofus as Mike Dukakis, the last Democratic presidential nominee the newspaper didn’t endorse — no endorsement was made in 1988 — but in the #TrumpDerangementSyndrome atmosphere in Washington and among the newspaper’s subscribers, it should have been allowed to go ahead, because it would have made exactly no difference in the outcome of the election, and the Post would not have lost a quarter million subscribers over the endorsement being spiked. Had Mr Bezos taken that decision in May, using as he did a return to the tradition of the newspaper not making any such endorsements, it would have been accepted, or after the election, in which it could have been easily accepted.

Then came the announcement of a change in editorial positions, to a more libertarian philosophy, and another 75,000 digital subscribers said, “See ya!” The change could have been made without the announcement, and without running off 75,000 subscribers.

At my old digital subscription rate of $129.00 per year, losing 325,000 subscribers means a loss of $41,925,000 in revenue. That’s a fairly substantial part of the reported $100 million loss for 2025.

So the newspaper is now offering new digital subscribers a first year for $40, which renews at $140 a year subsequently. I even made the “subscribe” button active for readers. But the newspaper would have lost a lot less money if Jeff Bezos hadn’t run off a bunch of current subscribers.

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The losses at The Washington Post It looks like the people who took the earlier buyouts were the smart ones

As someone who has a great fondness for newspapers — I delivered them when I was a teenager, and, being mostly deaf now, I have to read the news, not watch it on television — I was greatly pleased when billionaire Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post from the Graham family, which could no longer afford to keep it running, saving the newspaper from disaster. We previously noted that while Mr Bezos has a currently guesstimated net worth of $248.5 billion, a mere single-digit billionaire like Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns The Los Angeles Times, and his paltry $8.1 billion had to cut costs as his newspaper was hemorrhaging money.

It seems, however, that while Mr Bezos can afford the money losses at the Post, he appears to have decided that he needs to reduce the blood loss.

Washington Post says one-third of its staff across all departments is being laid off

Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the person’s role has or hasn’t been eliminated.

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 | 9:57 AM EST | Updated: 10:19 AM EST

The Washington Post is laying off one-third of its staff in the newsroom and other departments, a brutal blow at one of journalism’s most legendary brands.

The troubled Post began implementing large-scale cutbacks on Wednesday, including eliminating its sports department and shrinking the number of journalists it stations overseas. The changes were announced by executive editor Matt Murray in a Zoom meeting with staff.

The staff reduction is a significant psychic blow at the Post, known in history books for its Watergate revelations and most recently for aggressive coverage of President Donald Trump’s cutbacks to the federal workforce, and for journalism in general.

Staff members in the newsroom were told they would be getting emails with one of two subject lines, announcing that the person’s role has or hasn’t been eliminated. A Post representative confirmed that one-third of the staff would be cut, without saying how many total employees the newspaper has.

I guess that my good friend Heather Long got out at the Post just in time, because she now works as the Chief Economist for Navy Federal Credit Union!

Sadly, this is not something unexpected: the Post had already been making cuts, and trying to meet Mr Bezos’ requirement that the newspaper try to break even. However, it was Mr Bezos’ decision not to allow the newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris Emhoff which cost the newspaper around a quarter million paying subscribers. Since the newspaper had obviously been supporting the then-Vice President in every way other than the spiked endorsement, I fail to see how letting the endorsement be made would have changed the election, but spiking it certainly cost the Post money.

Mr Bezos defended his decision in the pages of the newspaper, saying “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” but if the Post reported on its own layoffs, I did not see it on the newspaper’s website front page or in a search for layoffs.

Perhaps the newspaper should have read its own masthead tagline, because if “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” added as a protest to President Trump during his first term, is keeping the readership in darkness about the newspaper’s layoffs really that great an idea?

It would take someone with Mr Bezos’ money, as Dr Soon-Shiong’s worried have demonstrated, to buy the newspaper from him. I once suggested that he simply give the Post to his ex, Mackenzie Scott, net worth $30.8 billion, because she likes giving away her money, and, for newspaper owners today, giving away their money really is what they have to do.

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Please, leave the government out of trying to ‘fix’ the ‘affordable housing’ problem

As people yell about the lack of “affordable housing” I see an interesting difference between my good friend — OK, OK, I’ve never actually met him in real life! — Architectolder, who posts a lot of pictures concerning houses interiors and exteriors, and Alicia, the Courtyard Urbanist, whom I have previously mentioned. Each have differing ideas about what makes a fine home, Architectolder favoring single family dwellings, while Alicia likes European-style courtyard housing. Alicia likes the idea of being able to walk downstairs and down and around the block to the local pharmacy, bodega, interesting shops and the like; who would not like to have a French boulangerie or pâtisserie just a few steps outside your door to grab a croissant for breakfast? Architectolder, on the other hand, is not afraid of people having to get into their cars to drive to a bakery. He believes that relatively small houses like the one in his tweet shown at the right ought to be affordably built: nice craftsmanship, a small but decently-sized yard appropriate to the house.

But then there was this, in Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

The cost of housing in Pa. is too high. Here’s what Josh Shapiro will need to overcome to fix it.

Administration officials spent the past year taking feedback from advocates, experts, and local officials.

by Charlotte Keith, Spotlight PA | Sunday, February 1, 2026 | 5:00 AM EST

HARRISBURG — Rents are soaring, homelessness is rising, and homeownership is out of reach for many families in Pennsylvania. As the state grapples with a serious housing shortage and affordability dominates the national political conversation, Gov. Josh Shapiro is preparing to release a long-awaited plan to tackle the crisis.

The plan, first announced in late 2024, will draw on months of outreach to advocates, developers, and local officials. Supporters hope it will offer a clear path forward and build momentum around proposals that can win support in Pennsylvania’s politically divided legislature. But significant obstacles stand in the way.

“The housing crisis has risen to the level such that none of the four caucuses can ignore it,” said Deanna Dyer, director of policy at Regional Housing Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm.

The housing shortage is a nationwide problem, but Pennsylvania has been particularly slow to build new units. The shortfall leaves families squeezed by rising costs, pushes recent graduates to take jobs in other states, and makes it harder for companies to expand.

There’s more at the linked original.

It seems that everybody seems to believe that the government needs to somehow fix the problem, but I’ll point out the obvious: virtually all of the housing in our country was built by private enterprise, by builders contracted by someone, whether an individual or a developer, to build houses, and that’s how our country began and grew to where we are today. Why should the government have to get involved?

The Inquirer fully supports the illegal immigrant population. As we have previously reported, the newspaper itself has reported an illegal immigrant population of between 47,000 and 76,000 people. Just deporting the illegal immigrant population should free up a lot of housing in the City of Brotherly Love, but naturally the newspaper wants to protect the illegals rather than see the law actually enforced, primarily because it is President Donald Trump who is finally enforcing our immigration laws, and the people at our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper hate the President with a white-hot passion.

Other states are passing laws to loosen local zoning restrictions and encourage new development — despite often fierce opposition from groups representing local governments.

Well, of course: local communities want to protect their typical American single-family home neighborhoods from having people build five-story apartment buildings which permanently shadow neighboring houses and change the character of neighborhoods. Zoning laws grew up to protect the American people, and to protect their investments in housing from being trashed by other development.

However, local governments can micromanage, and over manage things. When I lived in Hockessin, Delaware, our house, which was on a small farm, was surrounded by not one, not two, but three expensive house subdivisions. New Castle County, to combat overcrowding, reduced the number of homes which could be built on a 100-acre parcel. Great! People could get larger yards, right? But it also meant that developers had to build more expensive individual homes to achieve the same profit, and so Hockessin Chase, Hockessin Green and Hockessin Something-or-other were full of McMansions, driving up the costs of housing in the whole county.

On the opposite side of that coin are newer houses off Leestown Road in Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah, they’re the fancier new builds as well, but they’re so close together that you could hear your neighbor open his refrigerator, and if the houses were nice when they were built, most are now occupied by renters, not homeowners.

The best thing for government to do to address the ‘affordable housing’ problem is nothing at all. Every time the government tries to micromanage part of the economy it fails.

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You will own nothing and you will like it. The Communists want you to be poor, so you will be dependent upon the government for your survival.

My good friend Robert Stacy McCain wrote about new New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointing Cea Weaver to be Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. It seems like the lovely Miss Weaver wants people like you and me to be poor and dependent upon the government, a government she said on May 30, 2017, should have no more white male members.

This Activist Has Long Been Polarizing. Mamdani Is Standing by Her.

Cea Weaver, a tenant advocate named to a high-profile role in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, is facing criticism for past comments calling homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy.”

By Dana Rubinstein, Sally Goldenberg and Mihir Zaveri | Wednesday, January 6, 2026 | Updated: Thursday, January 7, 2026 | 8:47 AM EST

For the second time in three weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing intense scrutiny for the years-old social media behavior of a high-level appointee — an episode that has once again forced him to answer for his vetting processes.

Mr. Mamdani named Cea Weaver, a housing activist, to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants on Jan. 1, during his very first news conference on his very first day in office.

In past social media posts that have since been deleted, most of which predate 2020, she called homeownership a “weapon of white supremacy” and said that it was important to “impoverish” the white middle class. That rhetoric had played a role in raising her profile within New York housing circles, even as it seemed to hobble her 2021 bid to join the city’s powerful Planning Commission. Her calls to “elect more Communists” and “seize private property” had been well documented in The New York Post.

Heaven forfend! The New York Times actually cited the New York Post as a source? I am shocked, shocked! I say.

I suppose that Miss Weaver hates her own family, given that the New York Post reported:

The mother of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new woke renters’ rights honcho — who’s dubbed homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy” — is a professor at a prestigious college and owns a beautiful Nashville home worth $1.6 million.

Celia Applegate — whose daughter Cea Weaver is the director of Mamdani’s Office to Protect Tenants — teaches German studies at Vanderbilt University and owns a pricey classic Craftsman home just south of the main strip in Nashville, Tennessee.

Applegate bought the property with her partner, David Blackbourn, in July 2012 for $814,000 and real estate websites now list the pad’s value at more than $1.6 million, records show.

This article continues below the fold, because I have embedded a video of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago spouting the line, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!” Continue reading →

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The progressive ‘urbanists’ just don’t quite understand things

I will admit to being something of a very amateur architecture aficionado; I love great looking buildings, even though I’m in no position to afford one for our family. I follow people like Coby — “Working on creating better, more beautiful places to live in. Developer, Writer, Urbanist, Professor, Optimist. Check out my writing below!” — Alicia, the Courtyard Urbanist, Architectolder, who specializes in photography and who is a strong conservative, and Architecture & Tradition, along with other similar accounts on Twitter.

And these are great people, people who appreciate nice architecture and art, but most of them — not Architectolder! — have a bit of a blind spot. They praise urban living, and show many examples of really great urban housing, but, as in Coby’s tweet shown to the upper right, they don’t seem to appreciate the fact that most Americans cannot afford the places they’ve shown.

I once remarked how the houses in one of the Philly “Main Line” suburbs were great, but not only couldn’t I afford one of them, I couldn’t even afford one of their driveways!

Sure, I prefer the small farm on which we live, I prefer that I don’t have to walk the dogs every day, but can simply open the door and let them out to play on our 7.92 acres of property, and I prefer the fact that there are few other people out here, only one of whom I could actually call a neighbor. And yeah, I would certainly like to be able to walk five blocks to the Votre supermarché at 12 Avenue Baquis in Nice to pick up freshly baked croissants for breakfast, but not being able to do that is a small price to pay for having our own land.

But one thing about living in very poor Estill County, I can see what is around me. We bought our property very cheaply, just $75,000 in 2014: decent land, a livable if nevertheless fixer-upper house, which yes, we have been fixing up, and are still fixing up. I previously noted how we bought a second house, a two bedroom, one bath single family home, not for ourselves, but to rent to my wife’s sister. I didn’t mention the price, but it was just $70,000, and it, too, was a fixer-upper. You can see photos of my nephew and me remodeling the junked bathroom. These were cheap, eastern Kentucky houses, the last one bought just before Bidenflation struck interest rates.

This is what some of the urbanists just don’t understand. They see some real gems in the cities, but don’t seem to understand that most people can’t afford those really nice places. We have previously noted some of the urban houses and streets in which people have to live in Philadelphia because that’s all they can reasonably afford. When my good friend Alicia posts images of her favorite residential architectural style — much of the photos are from Europe — she’s posting images of places she might like to live, but places most working-class Americans couldn’t afford, nor residences which Americans could build for any affordable prices.

While Alicia hasn’t mentioned it at all in anything of hers I’ve seen, that courtyard living she champions looks to me like a version of the gated community, to keep out the poorer people and the bad guys and the riff-raff. But perhaps that’s what the urbanists really want, for themselves and their friends; the denizens of Strawberry Mansion and the Philadelphia Badlands can stay outside. A “pharmacy on your block, a farmer’s market that comes to the plaza out your front door, and a courtyard in your backyard” sure would sound nice to people, but in a lot of neighborhoods in the City of Brotherly Love, what the residents would see more useful are streets not run by criminals and gangs, and sidewalks not slept on by junkies.

 

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And now the news you missed

The New York Times reported, in December of 2024, when Joe Biden was still President, that the expected good will and economic resurgence of Cuba due to President Obama normalizing relations with the Communist country didn’t really materialize, noting that most Cubans are:

coping with prolonged power outages, standing in line at poorly stocked supermarkets and watching their friends, family and neighbors — sick of all the hardships — pack up and leave.

During his first term, President Trump walked back some of his predecessor’s policies, and President Biden only weakened Mr Trump’s restrictions slightly.

There were difficulties from the Cuban side as well, as the government was concerned that too much openness, especially to more information about the West, would weaken support for the Communist regime.

Now comes more news, this time from The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Oil Blockade of Venezuela Pushes Cuba Toward Collapse

Communist-ruled island was already suffering from food shortages, blackouts and exodus of people, and now faces loss of cheap oil from Nicolás Maduro

By Juan Forero and Ryan Dubé | Sunday, December 21, 2025 | 5:30 AM EST

Cubans are going hungry, suffering from spreading disease and sleeping outdoors with no electricity to power fans through the sweltering nights. A quarter of the population has fled during the island’s most prolonged economic crisis.

And it’s about to get worse.

The U.S. is ratcheting up pressure on Havana’s key benefactor, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime, which has kept the Communist-ruled nation afloat with cheap oil. Now Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to a partial blockade targeting sanctioned tankers — the kind that carry about 70% of the country’s crude.

One tanker that the U.S. has already seized was en route with almost two million barrels of Venezuelan oil.

The blockade adds to a U.S. pressure campaign on Maduro that also includes a major military buildup in the Caribbean, airstrikes on boats allegedly connected to Venezuelan drug trafficking and threats of bombing the country itself.

Were Venezuela’s oil shipments to stop, or sharply decline, the Cubans know it would be devastating.

“It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it,” said Jorge Piñón, a Cuban exile who tracks the island’s energy ties to Venezuela at the University of Texas at Austin.

Cuba could, of course, buy oil at market rates, which are rather low anyway right now, but nevertheless higher than what Venezuela was charging.

Cuba is really one of the last old-line Communist states out there, and it would be undoubtedly good if that government fell, though even if a strongly capitalist government took over, it would take many years before that nation could recover. I can’t say whether this was something that the Trump Administration considered when we put the pressure on Venezuelan drug runners, but it’s certainly a happy side effect. Of course, you had to read The Wall Street Journal to even know about it, ot, to say the least, I had not heard about it anywhere else.

If the Communist government falls, I wonder how many Cuban-Americans would head back to the island, and help bring it back from the brink.

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Ford CEO Jim Farley whines that government isn’t forcing people to buy electric vehicles

I’m starting to worry that I’m poaching too much on William Teach’s themes, with two previous articles in a week about plug in electric vehicles, but I spotted the following story this morning in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Ford CEO Jim Farley shares ‘shocking’ lesson he learned from Tesla

By Tony Owusu, TheStreet | Thursday, November 12, 2025 | 9:38 AM EST

Earlier this year, Ford CEO Jim Farley had a humbling experience in Asia.

The Detroit automaker has sunk billions into Model e, its electric vehicle division, for decades, with little to show for it.

In June, he told author Walter Isaacson during a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival that he made as many as seven trips to China over the past year.

“It’s the most humbling thing I have ever seen. Seventy percent of all EVs in the world, electric vehicles, are made in China,” Farley said. “They have far superior in-vehicle technology. Huawei and Xiaomi are in every car. You get in, you don’t have to pair your phone. Automatically, your whole digital life is mirrored in the car.”

Uhhh, maybe some of us would not see that as a great feature. A lot of people — I am not one of them — have their financial records on their phones, and pay some things with their too-smart phones. Perhaps some people wouldn’t want their cars to automatically “pair” with their phones, especially if it gives the car, and who knows how many other people, access to their lives and finances. With an estimated net worth of $72.9 million, perhaps Mr Farley is excited by every new gadget out there, and isn’t too terribly worried if someone pays for their Door Dash through Mr Farley’s accounts, but some of us poorer people do have to keep an eye on things.

The story continues to note how the CEO was impressed by superior technology and engineering, saying that Ford has to step up to compete, but then comes the money lines:

While Farley didn’t speak much about the builds of Ford’s Chinese rivals, he did praise the government for promoting the EV industry in a way the U.S. does not.

Farley said that “EVs are exploding in China” because the government there has put its “foot on the economic scale.”

In a Communist command economy, the government can put its “foot on the economic scale.” In a (mostly) free market in the United States, while there was some, thankfully expired, foot pushing in the form of government tax credits for buying electric vehicles and some states mandating that a certain percentage of new cars be EVs by 2030 to 2035, Americans exercising their free choices have not been so compliant. Toyota listened to what consumers wanted, and has focused on hybrids instead.

Perhaps it’s time that Mr Farley dumped his prejudices in favor of electric vehicles, and took a cold, hard look at what a free people taking free choices actually want.

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Amazing what can happen when manufacturers listen to what consumers want Electric cars nope; hybrids yup!

This site noted, just five days ago, that Ford Motor Company was considering doing away with its all-electric F-150 Lightning line of trucks, because the buyer demand for the vehicles just wasn’t there. Now there’s this, from The Wall Street Journal:

Toyota Doubles Down on Hybrids in the U.S. With $14-Billion Battery Push

New North Carolina plant is aimed at selling more hybrid cars and trucks to Americans

By Christopher Otts | Wednesday, November 12, 2025 | 1:28 PM EST

LIBERTY, N.C.—Toyota, a longtime hybrid car and truck promoter, is making one of the industry’s biggest bets on green transportation and opening a $14 billion battery plant here.

For years, Toyota held out against electric vehicles while rivals retrofitted factories and launched models in preparation for an all-electric future. Now that the EV market in the U.S. is vanishing as tax credits expire and sales disappoint, Toyota is doubling down on its hybrid strategy.

The Japanese automaker’s gamble: that American consumers—many of whom won’t touch an EV—will buy increasing numbers of hybrids, which often get up to 50% better mileage than a standard gas-powered car.

Toyota also said it would invest up to $10 billion in U.S. manufacturing over the next five years in addition to the North Carolina site, where it made the largest investment in a U.S. battery-production site.

The batteries that Toyota has begun making at the sprawling plant, located between the cities of Greensboro and Raleigh, are going into hybrids assembled in Kentucky and Alabama. The complex is designed to make batteries for EVs and hybrids, including those that plug in and travel short distances on just electricity before switching to gas.

Our family are familiar with hybrids, as our older daughter had a 2017 Toyota Prius Hybrid, and now drives a 2024 Prius Hybrid. It’s a good, solid vehicle, and she put a ton of miles on her first hybrid, as her civilian job took her on frequent trips throughout the eastern half of the country. She put nearly 200,000 miles on it, before trading it in.

The reason she traded it in was, of course, the battery. It was beginning to fail, and Toyota wanted $8000 to change it. That has always been the problem with the hybrids, and it’s something Toyota, and other hybrid manufacturers, need to address. I’d bet 25€ that all Toyota did was spend less than $2000 to swap out the battery to sell it used.

“For the longest time, folks were criticizing Toyota that they were so slow to the game in the battery-electric business,” said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive. But the strategy worked, he said. “They really did focus on the traditional hybrids, and they are dominating that whole product segment.”

In other words, Toyota’s leadership were smart enough not to listen to Joe Biden and the Democrats, who were pushing a technology and infrastructure that was simply not ready.

Toyota did listen, however, to consumers, to new automobile buyers, and the company’s actions reflect the free market, and the choices people take in a free country.